Yukiko Motoya - The Lonesome Bodybuilder - Stories

She didn’t like any of the clothes I’d bought for her either, so finally I decided to take her to another clothes shop, fitting room and all. I’d just remembered that our owner liked to change the decor of the boutique every once in a while, so our fitting rooms were movable, on wheels.

“Tell everyone I’ll be out for a bit,” I said to one of the other girls, and hooked the rope around my shoulders. It was heavy, but not impossible to pull forward. I headed into town, towing the fitting room. Pulling a thing like this in broad daylight, I’d been prepared for people to stare, but no one seemed to give it a second glance. I guess they thought we were setting up for some event or doing a photo shoot. My customer inside the booth, who’d been so hard to please, seemed to be having misgivings, saying, “There’s no need for you to go to so much trouble.”

“Please don’t be silly. We’ve come so far—we’re going to find the perfect thing for you, I promise,” I said, trying to keep her spirits up. “I want you to come out of that fitting room with a smile on your face!”

I was set on finding my customer something really special. I thought I’d take her to my favorite boutique. That meant navigating a serious hill through steep residential streets. I called on passersby for help. “What’s behind the curtain?” they wanted to know. When I said, “A valued customer,” someone said, “That’s a funny way of getting publicity,” but several of them offered to help push to the top of the hill anyway.

Together, we transported the fitting room. The steeper the incline got, the more the curtains swayed, and gradually I was able to make out the shape of my customer inside. No one else seemed to be looking, but I could see she wasn’t fat at all. She was smallish, but not especially tiny. More to the point, she didn’t really seem human. Draped in the curtains, she was an unusual shape that I’d never seen before. From time to time I could hear a sticky, slurping, roiling kind of sound, and then the curtain would bulge and cave in different places. I had no idea what she was at all. But it was really no wonder she couldn’t find an outfit that suited her when her body type was so unique!

I was just catching my breath, having towed the fitting room to the top of the hill—all that remained was to descend the hill on the other side—when the rope slipped from my hands and the fitting room started rolling down the steep street, casters rattling. I’d used up all my strength and didn’t have the energy to run after it. The fitting room hurtled down toward the bottom of the hill at an incredible speed, growing smaller and smaller.

“Madam!” I cried, as loud as I could. “You’re welcome to take that curtain, if you’d like.”

A hand stuck out from between the curtains and waved slowly at me for a long time, like someone saying goodbye from a departing car window. Then the hand threw something into the road. When I ran to pick it up, I saw it was a bank note in a currency I didn’t recognize.

Since then, I’ve taken to imagining all sorts of things about the things I see as I walk down the street. Anything at all could turn out to be something beyond my wildest dreams. My customer’s physique was kind of runny and grotesque, but depending on how you looked at it, you could also call it elegant. Picture a picnic blanket laid on a meadow—I bet that would look pretty good on her, like a floral print dress.

“Try these—they’re really delicious.”

I was in the bus shelter opposite the train station, staying out of the rain while I waited for my mom, when the old guy holding the umbrella and dressed in rags started talking to me. I hadn’t noticed him turn up, but he gave me a friendly smile and offered me a little packet of cookies.

“You look hungry,” he said. “Go ahead, take some.”

Even though we were in the middle of a huge typhoon and the ferocious wind was howling past my ears, I thought I caught a whiff of the old guy’s sour smell.

“Aw, cookies!” I said, taking them like a good child.

I was clutching the cookies inside my palm and nervously pretending to eat them when the guy pointed toward the junction where the wide station road met a smaller road and, out of nowhere, said, “Don’t ever underestimate people like them.” He was pointing at a man in a suit waiting for the lights to turn, desperately holding his umbrella open in the storm.

I didn’t react, but secretly I was pretty worried that he’d read my mind. I’d been watching people just like suit man passing by, laughing at them inside. Anytime I saw typhoon coverage on TV, I just had to wonder: What on earth were these people thinking? Walking along looking totally focused on holding their umbrellas open in front of them when their clothes, their hair, and most likely even their socks were wet through. I wanted to say, Are you sure there isn’t something wrong with your head? Are you grown men really kowtowing to umbrellas? But I’d never mentioned these thoughts to anyone else.

“Just watch,” said the old guy. “Soon he’ll be down to bare bones.”

I didn’t know what he meant, but his voice was strong like a sea captain’s, so I looked to where his gnarly finger was pointing, at the man in a suit holding on for dear life to the guardrail by the crossing. I’d nearly been blown out onto the road there too, earlier, as I battled the rain that blew horizontally into my face. Because it was a junction, the strong winds bore straight at you.

“Three! Two! One!” the old guy shouted, just as the man’s umbrella turned inside out like a rice bowl and its fabric disappeared as though an invisible man had ripped it off, instantly reducing the umbrella to just its skeleton.

I was speechless. The old guy’s timing had been perfect.

Associating with people like him was a bad idea. I knew this, but his shabby appearance and offensive smell didn’t bother me anymore. He handed me another packet of cookies, and I pretended to nibble them again, apologizing to him in my head for deceiving him. Oblivious to that, the guy started telling a story about some boy from a tribe that lived deep in a forest. He was explaining what the young kid did to win an umbrella that a foreigner had brought to their village.

“They beat each other with sticks,” said the guy. The wind was whipping his long, tangled hair around, and it looked like the strands were trying to feed on his face.

“Sticks?” I said.

“That’s right. In that village, they had a custom: once a year, the men would take turns hitting each other with a tree branch. So the village chief decided that whoever lasted the longest before letting out even a single sound would win the umbrella. None of the villagers had any idea what the umbrella was for. They thought the foreigners must use it to hit each other, as they did with sticks. No one in the village wanted to avoid getting rained on. Local tradition had it that rain was caused by sylvan spirits and was essential to the villagers’ reincarnation as insects after their death. People get reborn as insects in their mythology.”

Something unpleasant crawled up my spine, as if I’d just looked at a cluster of something tiny all packed together, like bug eggs. As soon as the guy had said “sylvan spirits,” I’d suddenly felt fearful and panicked about standing there next to him. Had I gotten myself into some kind of unsavory situation? I couldn’t take my eyes off the tip of the umbrella he was gripping. I stuffed the cookies he’d given me into a pocket.

The guy was still talking, his hair still nibbling away at his face. “The young boy wanted the umbrella so badly that he became the first boy ever to take part in the village custom of the men hitting each other with sticks. His opponent kept hitting him and hitting him, but he stuck it out to the end without uttering a single peep. Young boy—not a single peep. Got that? When his towering opponent finally gave a groan at the pain in his arm and conceded, the boy collapsed, and lay still. That’s right: he was dead.